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Priming Europe: Media effects on loyalty, voice and exit in European Parliament elections

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Abstract

Parties in government face a decline in EP elections after experiencing a surge in votes to win the national election. This occurs because voters are more inclined to give voice to their dissatisfaction with current government performance by voting for the opposition or exiting because less is at stake in second‐order elections. These elections negatively affect the electoral fortunes of governing parties as voters opt to punish poorly performing national governments in EP elections. Meanwhile, greater reliance on the EU issue dimension in vote choice models is taken as evidence for the increasing Europeanisation of EP elections. We examine the role of the media in making the EU issue dimension salient in such a way that government parties may benefit electorally from this increased saliency. To examine whether visibility of government party actors in media coverage increases loyalty for the governing parties either directly or via priming the EU issues for voters, we combine survey data from the 2009 European Election Studies with data on news coverage of those elections that links the governing party to the EU issue. We show that where the government is visible in EU news coverage, EU issue voting tends to increase loyalty while decreasing the probability to vote for the opposition and thus improves the electoral prospects for governing parties. This is even more the case if the issue is primed by negative campaign coverage.

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Acknowledgements

Support for this research was provided by the Austrian Science Fund (S10902-G11). We are grateful to the anonymous referees for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Unit ‘Democracy and Democratization’, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785, Berlin, Germany

    Heiko Giebler

  2. Department of Government, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Sylvia Kritzinger

  3. Department of Political Science, Quality of Government Institute, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Georgios Xezonakis

  4. Department of Politics, College of Social Science and International Studies, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Susan Banducci

Authors
  1. Heiko Giebler
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  2. Sylvia Kritzinger
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  3. Georgios Xezonakis
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  4. Susan Banducci
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heiko Giebler.

Additional information

This paper is part of a special issue of Acta Politica entitled ‘Information and Electoral Competition’ edited by Sylvia Kritzinger, Susan Banducci, and Heiko Giebler.

Appendix

Appendix

Table A1 Variable descriptions
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Table A2 Explaining exit, voice and loyalty in the 2009 EP elections
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Giebler, H., Kritzinger, S., Xezonakis, G. et al. Priming Europe: Media effects on loyalty, voice and exit in European Parliament elections. Acta Polit 52, 110–132 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-016-0025-x

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